Comments

That article reminds me greatly of this. Only the article forgot to include the subversiveness.

NumberSix
at June 15, 2010 9:27 PM

There are jokes to be made about a publication called the "British Journal of Aesthetics".

Crid [cridcomment at gmail]
at June 15, 2010 9:33 PM

Can you talk about deconstruction without mentioning Derrida a single time? I wonder how much that magazine pays, 'coz I'd bet writing stuff like that beats working...

old rpm daddy
at June 16, 2010 3:09 AM

> Can you talk about deconstruction without
> mentioning Derrida a single time?

Well, I was charmed by Amy's use of the word "asshole" in the blog post. Paglia once did a stint as an advice columnist for Spy magazine. A reader wrote in noting that there were lots of assholes in the world and asked "Who is El Sphinctero Grande?" Cammy replied "Foucault, naturellment!"

Offtopic—

I know that as a middle aged man, I'm supposed to be repulsed by the fashion of tattoos worn by young women. But this is getting out of hand.

Crid [CridComment at gmail]
at June 16, 2010 9:44 AM

I'm supposed to be repulsed by the fashion of tattoos worn by young women.

So you are repulsed by our apparent need to retribailize (engineers can make shit up as we go along too) ourselves with the sole purpose of sticking out from our mundane society. At one point tattoos meant something but with the standardization of the "Tramp Stamp" it's pretty much faded into normalcy like Goths and slut wear.

vlad
at June 16, 2010 10:12 AM

I think Comic Book Guy wrote that article.

David H
at June 16, 2010 11:59 AM

My compliments to the Mexican bandit leader's famous line from the film "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre". Wikipedia: Stinking Badges

"Logic? What is Logic? I don't recognize Logic. I don't have to show you any stinkin' Logic!"

Starting out a paper with Derrida is always a bad sign, unless you start it out with him in order to demolish him.

Sigivald
at June 16, 2010 2:28 PM

OK Crid, I clicked, and that is magnificent. For this one point in time, wonderful. What she's going to do with it when she's 50? There we may have a problem. It makes a much better piece of conceptual art on a conceptual body, alas, than on a real one.

SwissArmyD
at June 16, 2010 2:38 PM

What she's going to do with it when she's 50?

If she makes it to fifty like Helen Mirren made it to sixty, it'll still be fucking awesome!

Mary Q Contrary
at June 16, 2010 3:03 PM

My wife is 68, and I am not going to say Helen doesn't look better, because she does. But, not that much better.

irlandes
at June 16, 2010 6:59 PM

As a grad student in philosophy of math, my son-in-law attended some of Derrida's lectures at UC-Irvine and said he was surprised to note that the man actually made sense part of the time, in person.

This was a concept that neither he nor I would have considered possible, considering Derrida's idea that language is fatally imprecise. Examine a text closely enough, he says, and you can demonstrate that it means the opposite of what it seems to mean; deconstruct it completely and it means nothing at all. He says his goal in deconstructing a text is to demonstrate that it has no “boundaries, margins, coherence, unity, determinate meaning, truth, or identity.”

Also we were appalled by such Derridean lines as "Writing comes before speech," which is so bizarre I thought it was a typo at first. Even more idiotic is "There is nothing outside the text." In reality a text (spoken, written, sung, or signed) is a token passed from one person to another to convey some assertion about some subject. The persons, the subject, the medium chosen to display the text, and the context in which the interchange takes place all bear on our commonsense understanding of it, and every last one except the medium is outside it.

Derrida adds one more imponderable to an enduring mystery: Why does the civilized world keep encouraging French philosophers to bamboozle it?

Unable to answer my own question, I composed this little piece to illustrate why it is so puzzling.

Derrida Does Badminton

Know what Derrida reminds me of?

He reminds me of a guy who undertakes to make sense out of badminton, and he bases his whole enterprise on the premise “There is nothing outside the shuttlecock.” So he takes the shuttlecock out of the box and examines it, and watches it for a while, and he notices that it doesn’t do anything. So he takes it apart. Then, to his own triumphant glee and the stunned amazement of the civilized world, he proclaims he has discovered that the shuttlecock, which is entirely responsible for creating what we think of as “badminton,” performs no function and is actually quite meaningless, especially after it has been dismantled.

This kind of reasoning is screamingly bad even by French standards.

Axman
at June 17, 2010 12:06 AM

Well, thanks folks. How about that? Now I know just a little bit more about Derrida than that he was the deconstruction guy. I guess I should read something besides crime fiction (the new John Sandford is out now, by the way).

old rpm daddy
at June 17, 2010 4:17 AM

Quite frankly willfully ignorant, stupid people should just be taken out and shot.

lujlp
at June 17, 2010 5:12 AM

Something short of irony that this would be the first comment we've ever seen from you without a typo.

Maybe there's something to it.

Could've used a comma near the top, though. Tread carefully.

Crid [CridComment at gmail]
at June 17, 2010 9:36 AM

Its not thr first, its one of the few though.

lujlp
at June 17, 2010 10:50 AM

To quote Joan Hackett "Damn, damn, damn!"

lujlp
at June 17, 2010 10:51 AM

To say that language is imprecise is like saying water is wet.

Duh. Any and all attempt at communication is to some extent dependent upon the unknowable intentions and perceptions of the speaker & the listener.

Because these will usually differ, there are bound to be miscommunications and franly misinterpretations.

That is the entire point of political speach, to allow the listners to interpret things as they want them to be.

Look at both Obama & Bill Clinton's campaign mottos:

"Yes we can!" & "Change!"

Does it say what we can do?
NO.

Does it say what should change?
NO.

It leaves the meaning entirely to the listener, who in his or her desire to believe that this politician's views align with their own, interprets those things according to their own desires, projecting views onto the speaker that do not exist.

However the fact that language is imprecise and sometimes uncertain does not make it "meaningless", it simply means that one must aim more carefully with it. If we think of it as a revolutionary war musket...well that was a very imprecise armament in the best of circumstances, but by training and experience, its American users were able to hit small birds from a distance.

To be as precise as possible with language, one must practice with it. Study rhetoric, logic, and how to write and speak properly and think clearly.

The idea that language is without meaning because it is not perfectly accurate, is an argument of surrender to every half thought, half formed, insane, or just plain BAD idea any jackass can come up with.
It is an argument for intellectual laziness, and it horrifies me that some damnfool can make a living off of it.

Robert
at June 17, 2010 1:01 PM

Right, Robert. Politicians depend on slogans almost empty of content, but full of emotional appeal that makes people want them to mean something. Naturally, they fill the space with what appeals to them.

It's the same old trick used by ad writers, astrologers, cold readers, and religious charlatans.

Doesn't mean language can never carry a determinate meaning, though, as you suggest. Look at air traffic controllers. If their language could never get more precise than the suggestive formulas of astrologers, planes would collide on a regular basis, instead of extremely rarely. You'd think deconstructionists would take empirical evidence such as this into account. But no.

Axman
at June 17, 2010 6:38 PM

I was going to say a logocentrist must be someone with a special interest in words beginning with "l," "m," and "n," but that would more likely be a lexicentrist.

Axman
at June 17, 2010 6:52 PM

I don't know French and I don't know deconstruction. But Paglia, who's studied both, says that a lot of English speakers who became enamored of deconstruction didn't realize that a lot of it's seemingly playful implications were actually just wrinkles of the way the French language puts ideas together... So aside from the fact that it sounds like horseshit, the emperor is naked anyway. In 1991, she put it like this:

All I can say is thank God, by the time Lacan and Foucault appeared on the cultural landscape, I had already done all my preparations. I had been reading very deeply not only in college but especially during graduate school in the Yale library, so by the time they arrived I was intellectually prepared to see how specious they are. And therefore it never affected me. And now, of course, there are people who spent twenty years of their lives on these characters, and now, of course, they're a little irritated when someone says, "Oh, that was a waste." It's sort of like a period where people were told, because they had no taste of their own, that they should furnish their house in zebra Naugahyde furniture. So they went heavily into this, okay, their whole house is furnished in it. Then suddenly, twenty years down the road, someone like me appears and says, "Guess what--that's out now. Not only that, but it was in terrible taste to begin with."

If anybody knows what the more recent fads in the humanities have been since the days of Kurt Cobain, please tell us about them.

Crid [CridComment at gmail]
at June 17, 2010 7:12 PM

a lot of it's seemingly playful implications were actually just wrinkles of the way the French language puts ideas together

I've just recently been reading about that, too. Not about deconstruction, but about peculiarities of the French language. I think we think of the Romance languages as superior to English because of the regularity, but every language has its quirks. The main character in a series of novels I've been reading (the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, if anyone's interested) is fluent in French. He was reading a non-fiction book and said the language was slow to get through because it was written in the past historical tense, which is used only for formal historical writings. Apparently it makes the French quite difficult to slog through even for a fluent speaker.

For some reason Crid's Paglia quote reminded me of (apart from the Monty Python sketch) when I went to see the chamber opera The Lighthouse a few years ago. It was a performance for school groups, so I was there with some people from the various arts classes at my college. It's based on some speculation about what could have happened at this lighthouse in Scotland in 1900 (when the three tenders went missing with no explanation) and it's in English. I thought it was great, very spooky, but when it was over, the guy next to me turned and said "It's just not opera if it's not in Italian." Because there aren't any good ones in French or German, I guess (apparently that Wagner was a hack).

NumberSix
at June 17, 2010 8:28 PM

I remember when the windup for the second Iraq was happening, and Villepin was being such a prick, and the fresh blogosphere was full of piss, and people were very proud of taking "french fries" off their restaurant menus... And then some wag pointed out that both 'restaurant' and 'menu' were originally French words.

The only serious-pants opera in English I could name would be "Nixon in China" and that's hardly a certified classic... It's more like the Jesus Christ Superstar of the opera world. Or maybe the Porky's, if we're gonna keep it in the 80's,

Crid [CridComment at gmail]
at June 17, 2010 9:09 PM

That's what's funny about English, Crid. It's such a comparatively new language that it's an amalgam of words from many different languages. That whole "freedom fries" thing was ridiculous.

I was behind someone in a Starbucks once, around the "freedom fries" time, that threw a fit about wanting American coffee. He bought American, damn it, and he wasn't getting espresso or Kenyan or anything but American-grown coffee. It was funny to watch the barista explain that the only place coffee can grow in America is in Hawaii and that Kona is really expensive.

P.S. I haven't seen much opera (I did love Pagliacci), but I learned a good bit in a music class, and I found out that English-language opera came around about a hundred years after the Italian, and much of it was really successful in England. There are a lot of chamber operas in English now, because they don't use nearly as many instruments. There's one based on The Turn of the Screw that sounds really good. And I recommend The Lighthouse if you like a good ghost story turned murder mystery.

NumberSix
at June 17, 2010 9:33 PM

NumberSix are you utterly mad?

English dates back as far as any of the modern day spoken or written languages of Europe.

All of them have similar roots, with some variation between them.

Pick up a copy of The Story of French (see link)

I picked it up last year to help teach my daughter about the language I was having her learn.

You are right in that English has adopted so many words from other languages, we have many words for everything, words for things other cultures do not, for example, you can't ask how many children a man has in the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Because there is no word for "children" there is no gender neutral plural form, you have to ask how many sons and how many daughters seperately.

Its one of the great things about English I think, that we so readily adopt utilitarian words for artistic or functional purposes, as opposed to the elitism of French, (which I'll admit has its own charm for its relatively slow pace of change).

I'll never fathom an American's contempt for the flexibility and beauty of his own language (not saying you here, but there are plenty). Appreciating one's own uniqueness does not mean disparaging anothers. And appreciating another's does not destroy one's own.

English dates back as far as any of the modern day spoken or written languages of Europe.

When did I say anything about comparing old English to modern European languages? You're defining my statement more narrowly than it was intended. Perhaps I should have specified that I was talking about modern English, but I assumed it was implied as I was talking about opera, which didn't come about until almost the seventeenth century.

Yes, English has been around since the Anglo-Saxons, somewhere in or after the 400's. Early French originated about 200 A.D., Spanish was around in 200 B.C., and Italian in the form that we know it descended directly from Latin in the 1300s. And we can agree that Latin, from which all the Romance languages came, was around far earlier than all those, yes?

Modern English didn't come around until sometime after 1400. Old and Middle English are pretty incomprehensible today. Ever read an untranslated copy of Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales? I couldn't understand a damn thing.

So, when I say English is a comparatively new language, no, I am not utterly mad.

Because there is no word for "children" there is no gender neutral plural form, you have to ask how many sons and how many daughters separately.

That's really interesting. Is that a product of the culture, or is it just an accident of language? Actually, I've often bemoaned the lack of more gender neutral pronouns in English. I mostly hate "his or her," and "its" never sounds right when referring to people.

The things that drive me crazy about our language are also the things that I love about it. We can be so much more specific than other languages when it comes to some things, yet sometimes we can't ever quite hit the nail on the head the way others can. Keeps us on our toes, I guess.

Its one of the great things about English I think, that we so readily adopt utilitarian words for artistic or functional purposes

Yes! I loved learning in a book once (Angels & Demons, actually) that we've adopted so many technical terms from other languages (especially Latin) that English has become the de facto universal language of certain professions. This details the good and bad of that.

NumberSix
at June 17, 2010 11:49 PM

The only opera I've ever been able to listen to all the way thru is Lakme which is french if I remember correctly.